Sunday, August 04, 2002

Earthviewer. EarthViewer. One of the facts of life for a state CIO is that much of the information you deal with has latlong coordinates associated with it (all the other records have social security numbers).  While I was in Colorado this week, I had an opportunity to spend a few hours talking with John Gage, the Chief Scientist at Sun.  John showed me a piece of software called EarthViewer.  If you like maps, even a little, you'll love this program.  The program uses Keyhole satellite data to give you a view or anywhere on earth.  The software allows you to fly over the landscape.  Type in an address and you "fly" there in seconds.  I had fun going from where I grew up in Idaho to my brother's house in Virginia.  If the target point is in a metro zone, you can see things with 1m resolution. Dave Lorenzini, the CEO of Keyhole, Inc, makers of EarthViewer, has been great in getting me hooked up and talking to our GIS folks.  We have data layers for everything.  Putting them in this system would allow police to fly over an area and become familiar with it, find manholes, utilities etc. and even enter buildings based on plans all as part of a simulation with real live data.  We could make it as detailed as we want.    In a disaster, you could take reconnaissance pictures of the area and then survey the damage area in as much detail as you like from a safe distance.  Of course, you could do those things before, but the EarthViewer makes it accessible to people without training in specialized GIS tools.  [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] [McGee's Musings] 6:48:54 PM    comment []

Honey, Who Shrank the Circuits?. In a breakthrough that sets the stage for integrating devices into the wires themselves, scientists report new advances in nanotechnology. By Lakshmi Sandhana. [Wired News] Um, wow. W O W. This is like the holy grail of nanotech, being able to build itty bitty devices right on the wires. Die sizes will either shrink, or the dies as we know them will simply cease to be, and the largest parts on you computer will be the display and the batteries. Then again, in some of the MEMS based power generators come to be, you'll just need to top off the tanks every so often, not unlike a refillable butane lighter. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog] 6:41:07 PM    comment []

You Can Take it With You. HighWLAN [Slashdot] A teem of geeks manage to get a WiFi LAN running between two cars for a road trip. Very nice. Had they been running with a webcam they could have had voice/video communication between cars as well. Very cool, and a good way for a caravan of vehicles to stay in touch. The only problem they had was when a Tractor Trailer or other large vehicle came between two of their cars, as that would block the signal. Nicely done! [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog] 6:40:38 PM    comment []

Tivo-WAN. Network-enabled Tivo "I recently got networkworking on my Tivo. This allows me to do a lot of things I couldn't do before. For example, I can control the Tivo from any computer that's connected to the Internet. I can add season passes remotely, control what's currently playing, delete shows, etc. There are a lot of possibilities. One thing Tivo people like to do is compare and contrast the things their Tivos record for them. So I figured I'd make it easy for people by putting all that information up on the web. On my new Tivo page, you can see what's currently playing (even if nobody is currently watching it). You can also see the full list of shows now showing, all of my season passes and the todo list. Maybe someday I'll even get a screen capture of what's currently playing." [lukwarm.com, via life - listed chronologically] I am strangely fascinated by these lists on Lukas' site. I want this for my ReplayTV!! We need neighborhoods, aggregators, and rankings for sharing these types of lists. I actually probably would share my ReplayTV lists because I wanted to, but not if the entertainment industry demanded it. Too bad they don't understand how to work with their customers instead of repeatedly antagonizing them. [The Shifted Librarian] 5:34:21 PM    comment []